It strikes me that the outcome of all this outsourcing will
be an economic meltdown... since there's only so far we can
go back. We may have the kind of meltdown that _cannot_ be
recovered from.
The bean-counters and the executives seem to be working hard
to undo Henry Ford's only real innovation: paying people for
their work.
The final upshot is that *nobody* can afford to buy your
products regardless of the cost of manufacturing, so, over
time, the ability of people to buy these high-profit items
will decay.
What will IBM do when nobody can afford a ThinkPad?
What will Nike do when $100+ "athletic shoes" are out of the
reach of all but the CEOs?
A major problem is that employees are not cheap: beyond
salaries and semi-direct benefits, there are the mandated
Sociable Security costs *and* unemployment insurance.
I half expect some major corporations will move to make all
the worker bees per-diem workers; sure, they have to be paid
daily in cash, but there's no unemployment insurance and no
investment in their loyalty.
The problem causing this is that corporations are concentrating
on their rear-ends not their front-ends, on "shareholder sat"
instead of "customer sat". IBM's legendary attention to their
employees is gone; education budgets are either a joke or
don't exist, tech refreshes are way behind and there's a
belief that IBM will eat away at it's ability to do business
just to make the books look good. AT&T is apparently ahead
of IBM in this vivisection, BTW.
And IBM is in _good_ shape, when you come right down to it;
they've not been forced by the major stockholders (pension
and mutual funds) to ditch their labs... yet.
The "institutional investors" (one reason why "shareholder
satisfaction" efforts are idiotic since it presupposes some
kind of loyalty on the part of shareholders) are the ones
able to apply the pressure... which is why we're looking at
a meltdown w/i 10 years (if not less).
--
John R. Campbell Speaker to Machines [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Grace is sufficient so Joy was let go." - Heather L. Campbell
"Faith manages ... even though she can't get a promotion" - me
